Acres Manufacturing is unveiling the Foundation App Store, an ecosystem the company says will bring new ideas to the gaming industry by providing open and standard interfaces to third-party developers.
Foundation, the first-of-its-kind casino management system, provides casinos with real-time data from slot machines and a direct interface to the credit meter on any slot machine. Armed with a massive amount of real-time data, an adaptable credit meter on any game, and bonuses deployable to a player’s mobile device, casinos can use it to optimize every customer relationship and maximize long-term profitability.
“The Foundation App Store is a marketplace where casinos can discover new applications with guaranteed security and compatibility within the Foundation environment,” said Noah Acres, of Acres Manufacturing. “Any developer can create content for the Foundation platform. The speed and variety of new applications available on the platform will greatly increase casino profits for years to come.”
Foundation is a hardware device that installs into the slot machine and extracts all real-time data from the games. It can also be programmed to change the credit meters on command on any slot machine. And through a new breakthrough technology the company calls SAS-sharing, Foundation can be installed with no performance loss from the legacy casino management system.
“We take 100% of the raw SAS data and put it into an environment that the casinos have complete control over,” Acres explained. “Casino operators become the sole decider of which third parties are able to access their data. Foundation collects over a thousand times more data than casinos have ever accessed before. Instead of locking this data away in a closed ecosystem, we provide open APIs to any developer who wants to produce an application. Now, instead of a legacy system provider refusing to interface or charging an expensive interface fee, casinos are in complete control.
Acres said his company doesn’t have a monopoly on good ideas and welcomes anybody who wants to develop an application for the casino industry.
“That will bring a whole new scale and velocity of new ideas to the industry,” he assured. “We are getting ready to announce its first group of platform partners that have successfully interfaced to Foundation. These are companies that have products that have already been successfully tested and certified for compatibility with Foundation.”
Acres said the goal is to let casinos know that there’s a lot that can be done with their data. Acres is now able to tell them they have working products ready to deliver them a return on investment.
“Once the Foundation hardware is installed, additional applications can be downloaded to the existing hardware. There is no additional physical installation process.”
Acres noted that it’s been difficult historically for companies to bring in new products to casinos, and his company wanted to make that easier. They want to help anyone who has an idea for an application.
“Closed interfaces have dramatically slowed our growth as an industry. I remember when you couldn’t get Microsoft Word on an Apple computer because Apple had a closed environment. Once Apple evolved and started working with outside developers, they quickly became the most valuable company in the world. Apple’s App Store played an enormous role in that growth. We expect similar growth in the casino industry once Foundation is widely deployed.”
Acres said the casino industry has long faced pushback from companies with management systems that monopolize access to casino data by restricting outsiders.
“If a casino wants an application from a third-party developer, the systems provider will typically refuse to allow that application to interface because they want to be the one and only provider. We are tearing those walls down,” he said. “The data belongs to the casino. It doesn’t belong to us. It’s not our place to say what products can or can’t connect to the data. It’s the casino’s prerogative.”
More than 20 companies will be part of the first release, covering everything from data analytics and payment processing to game content.
